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Articles 301 - 330 of 577
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
Listening To Musical Performers, Aron Edidin
Listening To Musical Performers, Aron Edidin
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In the philosophy of music and in musicology, aprt from ethnomusicology, there is a long tradition of focus on musical compositions as objects of inquiry. But in both disciplines, a body of recent work focuses on the place of performance in the making of music. Most of this work, however, still takes for granted that compositions, at leas in Western art music, are the primary objects of aesthetic attention. In this paper I focus on aesthetic attention to the performing activity itself. I begin by roughly characterizing what is involve in attending to the performing activity of musical performers. I …
The Aesthetic Pulse Of The Everyday: Defending Dewey, Kalle Puolakka
The Aesthetic Pulse Of The Everyday: Defending Dewey, Kalle Puolakka
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In the relatively fragmented field of everyday aesthetics, some issues have gradually become the subject of increasingly heated debate. One of the primary disputes concerns aesthetic experience and how that concept should be understood. This article defends the view that the conception of aesthetic experience developed by John Dewey offers a much more promising foundation for a theory on the aesthetics of everyday life than some scholars have believed.
The Cacaio Project: Education For Environmental, Aesthetic And Moral Development, Atila T. Calvente
The Cacaio Project: Education For Environmental, Aesthetic And Moral Development, Atila T. Calvente
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Economic inequalities, institutional awkwardness, cultural underdevelopment, social exclusion, a fast rate of environmental, ecological, and biodiversity degradation have all been at the root of historic social injustice and structural poverty in Brazil for centuries. Human development and emancipation in this context should be approached as a set of non-formal educational practices to promote better learning and dignity. These would become potent means for reducing material poverty and selfish individual behavior, and for improving holistic modes of education and culture. Non-traditional educational practices can have an important influence in state-run schools, as well as in private schools, by enhancing resilience and …
Experience Of Awe: An Expansive Approach To Everyday Aesthetics, Thomas Leddy
Experience Of Awe: An Expansive Approach To Everyday Aesthetics, Thomas Leddy
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
As opposed to Melchionne and Naukkarinen, I defend an expansive definition of everyday aesthetics, one that includes festivals, tourism, and many daily activities of artists and other professionals, along with most ordinary and common experiences. I argue for continuities between aesthetics of everyday life and the aesthetics of art and nature. Looking through a window, for example, may involve aspects of all three. Although I agree with Melchionne that everyday aesthetics is closely related to questions of subjective well-being, I take a more expansive approach to this, drawing from recent psychological studies of the experience of “awe” to stress the …
What Is Temporal Art? A Persistent Question Revisited, John Powell
What Is Temporal Art? A Persistent Question Revisited, John Powell
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This article examines the fourteen conditions constituting Levinson and Alperson’s taxonomy of conditions for temporal arts. It claims that some of the conditions and several of the lists of arts exemplifying them need revision. It recommends adding a new condition concerned with the effects of the passage of time on gardens, environmental sculpture, and outdoor installations. The article concludes that gardens may be a model for understanding and appreciating other arts sharing the same bi-(multi-) modality.
Annunciations - Figuring The Feminine In Renaissance Art, John M. Carvalho
Annunciations - Figuring The Feminine In Renaissance Art, John M. Carvalho
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Viewers of Renaissance representations of the Annunciation miss an important irony. Where Mary is figured as unimpressed by Gabriel's proposal, she is upholding a masculinist ideal of female virtue. Where she is figured as delighted by the news, she represents an alternative feminine ideal that continues to be attractive to women and feminists, today. Inspired by the writings of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, I figure Mary in Renaissance representations of the Annunciation as contesting an ideal of feminine virtue that would deny her sexual difference and deny her pleasure in fulfilling her role as the bride and mother of …
Epistemic Function And Ontology Of Analog And Digital Images, Aleksandra Lukaszewicz Alcarez
Epistemic Function And Ontology Of Analog And Digital Images, Aleksandra Lukaszewicz Alcarez
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The important epistemic function of photographic images is their active role in construction and reconstruction of our beliefs concerning the world and human identity, since we often consider photographs as presenting reality or even the Real itself. Because photography can convince people of how different social and ethnic groups and even they themselves look, documentary projects and the dissemination of photographic practices supported the transition from disciplinary society to the present-day society of control. While both analog and digital images are formed from the same basic materia, the ways in which this matter appears are distinctive. In the case of …
Yellowism And Ontology: A Skeptical Analysis, Wesley D. Cray
Yellowism And Ontology: A Skeptical Analysis, Wesley D. Cray
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
When Vladimir Umanets entered the Tate Modern on October 7, 2012 and defaced Rothko's Black on Maroon, he was operating, not as an artist or a vandal, but as a Yellowist. Yellowism is neither art nor anti-art but is instead a supposedly new cultural element that exists for its own sake and is about nothing but the color yellow. It might be tempting to write Yellowism and the Rothko defacement off as a mere prank or as pseudo-intellectual fraud, but I argue that, intentionally or not, the Yellowists have raised issues salient to those invested in both the ontology of …
One Song, Many Works: A Pluralist Ontology Of Rock, Dan Burkett
One Song, Many Works: A Pluralist Ontology Of Rock, Dan Burkett
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
A number of attempts have been made to construct a plausible ontology of rock music. Each of these ontologies identifies a single type of ontological entity as the “work” in rock music. Yet, all the suggestions advanced to date fail to capture some important considerations about how we engage with music of this tradition. This prompted Lee Brown to advocate a healthy skepticism of higher-order musical ontologies. I argue here that we should instead embrace a pluralist ontology of rock, an ontology that recognizes more than one kind of entity as “the work” in rock music. I contend that this …
Longing For Clouds - Does Beautiful Weather Have To Be Fine?, Mădălina Diaconu
Longing For Clouds - Does Beautiful Weather Have To Be Fine?, Mădălina Diaconu
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Any attempt to outline a meteorological aesthetics centered on so-called beautiful weather has to overcome several difficulties: In everyday life, the appreciation of the weather is mostly related to practical interests or reduced to the ideal of stereotypical fine weather that is conceived according to blue-sky thinking irrespective of climate diversity. Also, an aesthetics of fine weather seems, strictly speaking, to be impossible given that such weather conditions usually allow humans to focus on aspects other than weather, which contradicts the autotelic character of beauty. The unreflective equation of beautiful weather with moderately sunny weather and a cloudless sky also …
Landscapes Of Human Experience, Martin Seel
Landscapes Of Human Experience, Martin Seel
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Landscapes of Human Experience, PDF download. This essay begins with some observations concerning the interaction between nature and art. Relying on these reflections, in the second part experience of landscape will be interpreted as a model for the human stance within the natural as well as the historical world. In the third part some consequences for an ethics and politics of saving the conditions for individual as well as social well-being will be drawn.
Norms Of Cultivation, Kevin Melchionne
Norms Of Cultivation, Kevin Melchionne
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this paper I identify a new group of aesthetic norms, which I call norms of cultivation. Judgments of taste are often accompanied by forecasts or expectations about future aesthetic satisfaction. When we find something beautiful, we expect to find it beautiful in the future. Forecasting is at play in all sorts of aesthetically motivated behavior. Yet psychologists have observed an unreliability in such forecasts. As a result of forecasting error, what we take as our taste can be an unreliable guide in our aesthetic lives. Compensating for the unreliability of taste are norms of cultivation, implicit rules for engaging …
Numbing The Heart: Racist Jokes And The Aesthetic Affect, Tanya Rodriguez
Numbing The Heart: Racist Jokes And The Aesthetic Affect, Tanya Rodriguez
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
People sometimes resist the idea that racist humor fails on aesthetic grounds because they find it funny. They make the case that we can enjoy its comic aspects by controlling our attention, by focusing on a joke’s rhythm or delivery rather than on its racist content. Ironic intent may reside with the joke teller and/or the audience. I discuss how arguments for the immorality of racist jokes fall short. Ironic racist jokes may be acceptable to an audience that already rejects racism but is comfortable with such ironic racist joking precisely because as individuals they feel confident in their own …
(Dis)Functions: Marxist Theories Of Architecture And The Avant-Garde, Michael Chapman
(Dis)Functions: Marxist Theories Of Architecture And The Avant-Garde, Michael Chapman
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper investigates the relationship between architecture and theories of the avant-garde in the critical projects of the 1970s, with a focus on the theories of Peter Bürger and Manfredo Tafuri. Both Tafuri and Bürger were writing from within the context of a radicalized Marxism and were fueled by an intellectual pessimism towards the totalizing systems of cultural production that questioned the role of resistance in aesthetics and the inability of the historical avant-gardes to engage within the political and economic fields of contemporary society. While there is a common ancestry to these two approaches, and mutual acceptance of the …
Politics And Aesthetics: Partitions And Partioning In Contemporary Art, Jonathan Owen Clark, Joao Lima Duque
Politics And Aesthetics: Partitions And Partioning In Contemporary Art, Jonathan Owen Clark, Joao Lima Duque
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Jacques Rancière defined the “distribution of the sensible” as the effect of a type of aesthetico-political decision-making that creates a partitioning of the realm of the perceivable in relation to both art and society. The artworld itself constructs its own particular types of curatorial partitioning: between “art” and “non-art,” between “dominant, residual, and emergent,” and between “mainstream” and “periphery.” This essay examines certain “boundary effects” that develop as a result of the act of the partitioning itself and closely examines what arguably are two new categories in contemporary art: “crossover” and “interventionist.” Both categories have a certain relationship to a …
Contemporary Aesthetics: Perspectives On Times, Space And Content, Ossi Naukkarinen
Contemporary Aesthetics: Perspectives On Times, Space And Content, Ossi Naukkarinen
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
What is contemporary aesthetics? The answer to this question is often simply stated rather than carefully elaborated, even if the current nature and scope of the discipline is far from self-evident. To examine how both the concept and the field of contemporary aesthetics can be understood, I suggest that it is useful to consider three themes: the time, space, and content of aesthetics, i.e., the questions of when, where, and what contemporary aesthetics is. Through this, it is possible to construe a conceptual space of contemporary aesthetics and to compare different instantiations of it with each other.
Reflections On Music And Propaganda, Luis Velasco Pufleau
Reflections On Music And Propaganda, Luis Velasco Pufleau
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In general, the concept of propaganda refers to a method as well as the symbolic object mobilized by it. Propaganda equally constitutes a particular type of communication that involves not only the mobilization of objects, but also of discourse, places, acts, and rituals. This essay employs the writings of Max Weber, Paul Ricœur, Jacques Ellul, and Jacques Rancière to analyze propaganda as a particular type of symbolic political dispositif linked to a specific performance and utterance context. I examine humanitarian songs as a propaganda tool in democracy, and show the conditions and the limits of their mobilization through their contextualization. …
Musical Ontology: Critical, Not Metaphysical, Jonathan A. Neufeld
Musical Ontology: Critical, Not Metaphysical, Jonathan A. Neufeld
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The ontology of musical works often sets the boundaries within which evaluation of musical works and performances takes place. Questions of ontology are therefore often taken to be prior to and apart from the evaluative questions considered by either performers as they present works to audiences or an audience’s critical reflection on a performance. In this paper I argue that, while the ontology of musical works may well set the boundaries of legitimate evaluation, ontological questions should not be considered as prior to or apart from critical evaluation. Rather, ontological claims are a type of critical evaluation made within musical …
Historical Formalism In Music: Toward A Philosophical Theory Of Musical Form, Andrea Baldini
Historical Formalism In Music: Toward A Philosophical Theory Of Musical Form, Andrea Baldini
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this paper I begin to fashion a theory of musical form that I call historical formalism. Historical formalism posits that our perception of the formal properties of a musical work is informed by considerations not only of artistic categories but also of the historical, sociopolitical, and cultural circumstances within which that work was composed.
Pushing The Limits: Risk And Accomplishment In Musical Performance, David Clowney, Robert Rawlins
Pushing The Limits: Risk And Accomplishment In Musical Performance, David Clowney, Robert Rawlins
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Using examples from musical performance of several kinds, we argue that risk-taking, showing off, virtuosity, and other forms of musical showmanship are in many cases, though not in all, an integral and appropriate part of the music as performed on that occasion. We reflect on the difference between cases where this is so and cases where it is not, using insights from John Dewey’s aesthetics as articulated in Art as Experience.
Schiller Revisited: "Beauty Is Freedom In Appearance" Aesthetics As A Challenge To The Modern Way Of Thinking, Wolfgang Welsch
Schiller Revisited: "Beauty Is Freedom In Appearance" Aesthetics As A Challenge To The Modern Way Of Thinking, Wolfgang Welsch
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This essay re-evaluates Schiller's idea of beauty as “freedom in appearance,” as brought forward in his Kallias or On Beauty(1793), against the backdrop of early modern and modern thinking that based itself on a fundamental split between nature and freedom, world and man. Schiller's claim that natural beauty results from freedom in nature bridges this gap. His suggestion is confirmed by modern science. Schiller's view is recommended and defended as a way of escaping modern bigotry
The Point Of Everyday Aesthetics, Kevin Melcionne
The Point Of Everyday Aesthetics, Kevin Melcionne
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The point of everyday aesthetic activity is well-being
Dewey And Everyday Aesthetics - A New Look, Kalle Puolakka
Dewey And Everyday Aesthetics - A New Look, Kalle Puolakka
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
John Dewey is frequently mentioned as an important forerunner of everyday aesthetics. In this article, I attempt to provide an updated view of Dewey’s place within everyday aesthetics by drawing attention to aspects in Dewey’s own work and in contemporary interpretations of his philosophy that have not been thoroughly discussed in the context of everyday aesthetics. In the first part, I offer a reading of Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience that unties its content through noting the important position Dewey ascribes to imagination in aesthetic experience in the later parts of Art as Experience. The second pillar of the pragmatist …
Nancy And Neruda: Poetry Thinking Love, Joshua M. Hall
Nancy And Neruda: Poetry Thinking Love, Joshua M. Hall
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
My intention in this paper is to respond to Jean-Luc Nancy’s claim that poetry, along with philosophy, is essentially incapable of what Nancy describes as “thinking love.” To do so, I will first try to come to an understanding of Nancy’s thinking regarding love and then of poetry as presented in his essay “Shattered Love.” Having thus prepared the way, I will then respond, via Pablo Neruda’s poem “Oda al Limón,” to Nancy’s understanding of poetry vis-à-vis “Shattered Love.” This response, in acting out Nancy’s thinking regarding love, will suggest a greater plurality within poetry than Nancy acknowledged